You Report, We Decide

REUTERS: Police said they were seeking several missing people and the toll could rise to 98, in the worst case. Breivik hated “cultural marxists,” wanted a “crusade” against the spread of Islam and liked guns and weightlifting, web postings, acquaintances and officials said. A video posted to the YouTube website showed several pictures of Breivik, including one of him in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon. “Before we can start our crusade we must do our duty by decimating cultural marxism,” said a caption under the video called “Knights Templar 2083″ on the YouTube website, which took down the video on Saturday. A Norwegian website provided a link to a 1,500 page electronic manifesto which says Breivik was the author. It was not possible to verify who posted the video or wrote the book. “Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike,” the book said. Norway has traditionally been open to immigration, which has been criticized by the Progress Party, of which Breivik was for a short time a member. The Labour Party, whose youth camp Breivik attacked, has long been in favor of immigration. Police took almost 1.5 hours to stop the massacre, the worst by a single gunman in modern times. “The response time from when we got the message was quick. There were problems with transport out to the island,” he said, defending the delay. Witnesses said the gunman, wearing a police uniform, was able to shoot unchallenged for a prolonged period. He picked off his victims on Utoeya island northwest of Oslo forcing youngsters to scatter in panic or to jump into the lake to swim for the mainland. “I heard screams. I heard people begging for their lives and I heard shots. He just blew them away,” Labour Party youth member Erik Kursetgjerde, 18, told Reuters. “I was certain I was going to die.” The bloodbath was believed to be the deadliest attack by a lone gunman anywhere in modern times. MORE

RELATED: Anders Behring Breivik, the chief suspect in Friday’s twin terrorist attacks in Norway, copied passages from infamous American Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto and used them in his own writing. Breivik’s 1,500-page political manifesto, titled “A European Declaration of Independence” and posted on the website (link in Norwegian) along with other writings by Breivik, copied some of Kaczynski’s document almost verbatim. The alleged gunman replicated passages 6 through 23 of the Unabomber’s manifesto, but made some slight changes. For example, Breivik replaced the word “leftist” with “cultural Marxist;” while “leftism” was replaced with “Multiculturalism” and “cultural Communism,” according to Rustad. The titles of sections of Breivik’s online manifesto, the authorship of which could not be verified, include, “What your government, the academia and the media are hiding from you,” “Documenting EU’s deliberate strategy to Islamize Europe” and “How the feminists’ ‘War Against the Boys’ paved the way for Islam.” Breivik calls for a “conservative revolution” and “preemptive declaration of war,” including “armed resistance against the cultural Marxists/multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe.” MORE

RELATED: Police were not called until 50 minutes after the shooting began. It then took a SWAT team 20 more minutes to arrive at the lake and another 20 minutes to find a boat to cross the island. Was this a failure of Norwegian special police units? It seems almost certain that a faster response, perhaps aided by police helicopters, could have prevented at least some of the deaths at the youth camp, which was being held for Labor Party activists, who Breivik saw as a threat to Christianity and European sovereignty. Breivik killed more Europeans than all the Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe since the attacks in Madrid combined. This was not an attack that anyone saw coming. But were there signs of an attack in the making that police should have seen? A fertilizer store had alerted police earlier that Breivik had purchased six metric tons of fertilizer, but Breivik rented a farm so there would have been little reason to suspect him as someone who would have purchased the fertilizer to make bombs. As more details emerge we may find out that police were somehow negligent, but at the moment these attacks seem to have come out of nowhere. Even his politics don’t peg Breivik as the mass-murdering type. He was not a die-hard nationalist, supported Israel, and was at least somewhat socially liberal, supporting policies such as gay rights. He fit neither the pure white-supremacist nationalist MO and nor does he appear to be simply insane, but rather quite capable of planning a complicated and well-executed (if cowardly and despicable) attack. MORE

RELATED: Repudiating multiculturalism has lately become obligatory among European leaders. According to a survey commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., anxiety about immigration is more acute in Britain than in any other European country surveyed. And, as in the rest of Europe, in Britain—where the Muslim population has increased by seventy-four per cent, from 1.6 million to an estimated 2.8 million since 2001—concern about immigration is often a euphemism for concern about Islam. Fifty-two per cent of respondents to a poll of five thousand believed that Muslims create problems in their country. In an unseemly coincidence, as Cameron spoke thousands of Britons were preparing to take to the streets in Luton, thirty miles north of London. The occasion was the latest in a series of marches organized by a two-year-old group called the English Defence League. The E.D.L. bills itself as “a human rights organization that exists to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.” Labour M.P. Jon Cruddas has called the E.D.L. “a dangerous cocktail of football hooligans, far-right activists, and pub racists.” The E.D.L.’s twenty-four demonstrations, in cities across the country, have resulted in hundreds of arrests. MORE

RELATED: Every Time Fox News Gins Up Some Phony Mosque Controversey It Waters The Flowers Of Evil*

*Just sayin’ and no, it’s not’ too soon,’ it’s too late

This entry was posted
on
Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 at
12:36 pm and is filed under
News .
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.